teapot, Gertie dear!”     

       The door opened, not Alec, but the General came in, and closed the door carefully behind him; it was obviously an act of precaution and not merely a normal exercise of good manners. Then he walked up to his hostess and said, “It’s not my fault, Anna. Alec would do it, though I shook my head at him, behind the fellow’s back.”     

       “What do you mean, General?” cried the hostess. Mr. Naylor, for his part, stopped roving.     

       The door again! “Come in, Mr. Beaumaroy—here’s tea.”     

       Mr. Beaumaroy obediently entered, in the wake of Captain Alec Naylor, who duly presented him to Mrs. Naylor, adding that Beaumaroy had been kind enough to make the fourth in a game with the General, the Rector of Sprotsfield, and himself. “And he and the parson were too tough a nut for us, weren’t they, sir?” he added to the General.     

       Besides being an excellent officer and a capital fellow, Alec Naylor was also reputed to be one of the handsomest men in the Service; six foot three, very straight, very fair, with features as regular as any romantic hero of them all, and eyes as blue. The honorable limp that at present marked his movements would, it was hoped, pass away. Even his own family were often surprised into a new admiration of his physical perfections, remarking, one to the other, how Alec took the shine out of every other man in the room.     

       There was no shine, no external obvious shine, to take out of Mr. Beaumaroy, Miss Wall’s puzzling, unaccounted-for Mr. Beaumaroy. The light showed him now more clearly than when Mary Arkroyd met him on the heath road, but perhaps thereby did him no service. His features, though       irregular, were not ugly or insignificant, but he wore a rather battered aspect; there were deep lines running from the corners of his mouth, and crowsfeet had started under the gray eyes which, in their turn, looked more skeptical than ardent, rather mocking than eager. Yet when he smiled, his face became not merely pleasant, but confidentially pleasant; he seemed to smile especially to and for the person to whom he was talking; and his voice was notably agreeable, soft and clear—the voice of a high-bred man, but not exactly of a high-bred Englishman. There was no accent definite enough to be called foreign, certainly not to be assigned   

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